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That’s a fair point. I haven’t looked at their contributions, but it would be nice if they’d help out the project as a whole as well. I also got a Linux prein

• gumby 5y ago
  NeXT funded and performed quite a bit of open source software, quite a bit of which continued in the Apple transition. Make no mistake: for all of these companies, this funding was in support of their commercial activities. They have no desire, say, to write a shell so if one is popular they'll go that way. One thing we taught then in the 90s was that stepping off the mainline simply added to your support cost; this lesson is why so many proprietary companies do contribute back. Apple's case is interesting: they think more deeply than many about this. Thus they are enthusiastic about standards when they are weak in the domain: e.g. Apple was explicit up to the Jobs level that they embraced open standards like JPEG and MP3 when trying to dig the Mac out of a deep hole; once they had a solid foothold they felt comfortable trying out proprietary formats. They went USB-C (and handed over a majority of the work on its design to the USB consortium, or so a couple of friends who worked on the standard claimed to me) because it helps adoption of the Mac and iPad; but aren't afraid to make a MagSafe connector. It's all about strength and weakness to Apple, an approach which frankly more companies should adopt (looking at you MediaTek, AllWinner and your competitors).